Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  “Good.”

  “Fine.”

  She turns on her heel and starts running.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he asks me. “I said I’d find her mom. I didn’t say she’d like the results. God, that kid drives me up a freaking wall.”

  “I know.”

  “Her mother probably stayed away because she’s such a pain in the ass.” He grimaces. “I don’t mean that. Jenna’s right. If I’d trusted my instincts ten years ago, we’d never be here.”

  “The question is, would Alice Metcalf?”

  We both think about that for a moment. Then he glances at me. “One of us should go after her. And by one of us, I mean you.”

  I take my keys out of my purse and unlock the car. “You know, I used to filter the information I got from spirits. If I thought it was going to be painful to my client, or upsetting, I’d leave the message out of my reading. Just pretend I never heard it. But eventually I realized it wasn’t my business to judge the information I was getting. It was just my job to relay it.”

  Virgil squints. “I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me.”

  I slide into the driver’s seat, turn on the ignition, and roll down my window. “I’m just saying that you don’t have to be the ventriloquist. You’re the dummy.”

  “You just wanted to be able to say that to my face.”

  “A little bit,” I confess. “But I’m trying to tell you to stop being invested in where this is leading, and stop trying to steer it. Just follow where it goes.”

  Virgil shades his eyes in the direction Jenna went. “I don’t know if Alice is a victim who ran to save her life, or a perp who took someone else’s life. But the night we were called to the sanctuary, Thomas was upset about Alice stealing his research. Kind of like he was today.”

  “You think that’s why he tried to kill her?”

  “No,” Virgil says. “I think that was because she was having an affair.”

  ALICE

  I have never seen a better mother than an elephant.

  I suppose that if humans were pregnant for two years, the investment might be enough to make us all better mothers. A baby elephant can do no wrong. He can be naughty, he can steal food from his mother’s mouth, he can move too slowly or get stuck in mud, and still, his mother is patient beyond belief. Babies are the most precious things in an elephant’s life.

  The protection of the calves is the responsibility of the entire herd. They cluster, with the babies walking in the middle. If they pass one of our vehicles, the baby is on the far side, with the mother forming a shield. If the mother has another daughter, six to twelve years old, they often sandwich the baby between them. Often, that sibling will come up to the vehicle, shaking her head to threaten you, as if to say, Don’t you dare; that’s my little brother. When it’s the height of the day and nap time, babies sleep under the canopies of their mothers’ massive bodies, because they are more susceptible to sunburn.

  The term given to the way babies are brought up in elephant herds is allomothering, a fancy word for “It takes a village.” Like everything else, there is a biological reason to allow your sisters and aunts to help you parent: When you have to feed on 150 kilograms of food a day and you have a baby that loves to explore, you can’t run after him and get all the nutrition you need to make milk for him. Allomothering also allows young cows to learn how to take care of a baby, how to protect a baby, how to give a baby the time and space it needs to explore without putting it in danger.

  So theoretically you could say an elephant has many mothers. And yet there is a special and inviolable bond between the calf and its birth mother.

  In the wild, a calf under the age of two will not survive without its mother.

  In the wild, a mother’s job is to teach her daughter everything she will need to know to become a mother herself.

  In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies.

  JENNA

  I’m walking along the state highway when I hear a car crunching on the gravel behind me. It’s Serenity, of course. She pulls up and swings open the passenger door. “Let me at least drive you home,” she says.

  I peer into the car. The good news is that Virgil isn’t in it. But that doesn’t mean I feel like a heart-to-heart with Serenity, where she tries to convince me that Virgil is just doing his job. Or worse, that he may be right.

  “I like walking,” I tell her.

  There is a run of flashing lights, and a cop car pulls up behind Serenity.

  “Great,” she says and sighs. And to me: “Get in the goddamn car, Jenna.”

  The cop is young enough to still have zits, and a flat top as manicured as the eighteenth green at a golf course. “Ma’am,” he says. “Is there a problem?”

  “Yes,” I say, at the same time Serenity says, “No.”

  “We’re fine,” I add.

  Serenity grits her teeth. “Honey, get in the car.”

  The cop frowns. “I beg your pardon?”

  With a loud sigh, I climb into the VW. “Thanks anyway,” Serenity says, and she puts on her left signal and pulls into traffic doing about six miles an hour.

  “At this rate I’d get home faster if I did walk,” I mutter.

  I poke through the trash that litters her car: ponytail scrunchies, gum wrappers, Dunkin’ Donuts receipts. An ad for a sale at Jo-Ann fabric, even though to my knowledge she is not crafty in the least. A half-eaten granola bar. Sixteen cents and a dollar bill.

  Absently, I take the dollar bill and start folding it in the shape of an elephant.

  Serenity glances at me as I flip and crease and press. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”

  “My mother taught me.”

  “What were you, a savant?”

  “She taught me in absentia.” I look at her. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn from someone who’s completely disappointed you.”

  “How’s your eye?” Serenity asks, and I almost laugh, it’s such a perfect transition.

  “Hurts.” I take the finished elephant and prop it in the little nook that has the radio controls. Then I shrink down in my seat, pressing my shoes against the dashboard. Serenity has a fuzzy blue steering wheel cover meant to look like a monster, and an ornate cross hanging from her rearview mirror. They seem about as far apart on the belief scale as humanly possible, and it gets me thinking: Can a person hold tightly to two thoughts that look, at first sight, as if they’d cancel each other out?

  Could my mother and my father both be blamed for what happened ten years ago?

  Could my mom leave me behind but still love me?

  I glance at Serenity, with her violently pink hair, and the too-tight leopard-print jacket, which makes her look like a human sausage. She is singing a Nicki Minaj song, and getting all the lyrics wrong, and the radio isn’t even on. It’s easy to make fun of someone like her, but I love that she doesn’t apologize for herself: not when she curses in front of me; not when people in elevators stare at her makeup style (which I’d say is pretty much geisha-meets-clown); not even when—it should be noted—she made a colossal mistake that cost her a career. She may not be very happy, but she is happy to be. It’s more than I can say about myself. “Can I ask you a question?” I say.

  “Sure, sugar.”

  “What’s the meaning of life?”

  “Well, Christ on a cracker, girl. That’s not a question. That’s a philosophy. A question is, Hey, Serenity, can we swing through a McDonald’s?”

  I’m not letting her off the hook that easily. I mean, someone who talks to spirits all the time can’t just chat about the weather and baseball. “Didn’t you ever ask?”

  She sighs. “Desmond and Lucinda, my spirit guides, said all the universe wants from us is two things: Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy. They told me humans make it more complicated than it needs to be. I thought for sure they were feeding me a line. I mean, there’s got to be more to it than that. But if